We just got home from a weekend in LA to celebrate Jay’s grandma Mildred’s 100th birthday. She’s such an amazing person—funny, full of incredible stories, and still extremely present, even after living in this crazy world for 100 years. It’s hard to even wrap your head around all that she’s lived through: the depression, too many wars, the population of the world growing from 1.6 billion to close to 7 billion. Wow.

Next week is Nikita’s 14th birthday! Although we come up with new nicknames for her every few days–and so there have been thousands of names, we rarely write them down and often forget them as ever new names take the stage.

For this birthday, I thought I’d write down the new name I spontaneously called her tonight: Hungry Monkognonis.

It’s Nikita’s 13th birthday today, and considering we did one of her most *unfavorite* things today (vacuumed), I decided I should at least put a little tribute up for her on the blog. I’ll also give her a couple treats since she could care less about the blog. Anyways, here are a couple more photos from her kitty youth:

She still gives us this look today:

We called this her “rabbit pose” (she doesn’t really do this anymore):

This is one of my favorite portraits of her from her early years living in the country:

Yesterday we celebrated our niece Jasmine’s 5th birthday. She’s convinced she IS Princess Jasmine. Also in the photos are nephews Skyler and Colin, Jasmine’s friends Grace and Riley, and the strawberry cloud cream filled and frosted cake I made (and of course, "the baby" who never fails to freak us out as we see it in the lawn).